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Ian Strange (AKA Kid Zoom)

New York City, New York

“Perhaps the one benefit coming from a completely remote, nearly unknown town in western Austrailia is that if there is nobody around you doing graffiti, you kinda have to figure it out for yourself.”

– Kid Zoom

Australian born and NYC-based, Kid Zoom is a street artist that has been endorsed as a “Rembrandt with a spray can” (by legend Ron English, no less) who has exploded onto the scene with his amazing freehand painting. Raised in Perth, Australia as Ian Strange, Kid Zoom has been heralded as the next big thing in street art, exhibiting near-medical precision in his execution of both photo-realistic and distorted pop culture paintings. And no, not the the “medical precision” that you read about in the tabloids after a celebrity facelift…real doctors, real precision.

In our opinion, Kid Zoom distances himself from the proverbial pack in his balance of technical precision and conceptual freedom — his work has the tuned characteristics of a fine art work, while pushing the envelope with subversive and often controversial subject matter. Whether Ian is “tagging” animals (kangaroos and bears, to name a few) or working on extremely realistic portraiture, his precision and artistic craft shine. His most recent work is among our favorites: a full-scale replica of the artist’s childhood home, purportedly rebuilt solely from adolescent memory. Conceptually, this is an incredibly personal and tactile representation of a memory, which has been executed to full effect and great success.

For more of the Kid, make sure to check out his website, complete with a gallery of work and a link to his blog. For the aesthetes, the gallery will suffice, but the blog provides a great deal of background information that reveal the meaning and process behind this star’s work. If those aren’t enough, there’s always Twitter!